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The legacy of classical American Pragmatism—Peirce, James, Dewey, Addams, Mead, Follett, and others—in organization theory has been significant, albeit that much of its influence has come through implicit and indirect routes. In light of recent calls for an empirical stance in organizational research, we read Pragmatism as a process philosophy that is highly relevant for process views of organization and organizing. Our reading highlights its emphasis on process and emergence, its theory of knowing as fallible and experimental, its denouncing of dualisms, its future-oriented meliorism, its sensitivity to ethics and democracy, and its positioning of experience as both the start and end of inquiry, arguing that these features lay invaluable groundwork for the study of organization and organizing. We advocate a reappraisal of this legacy, mobilising seven articles from the back catalogue of this journal in a virtual special issues that demonstrates how classical American Pragmatism can reinvigorate the field while also opening up new questions and new ways of questioning.

The legacy of classical American Pragmatism – Peirce, James, Dewey, Addams, Mead, Follett and others – in organization theory is significant, albeit that much of its influence has come through implicit and indirect routes. In light of recent calls for an empirical stance as an alternative to the prevailing metaphysical stance in organizational research, we reread Pragmatism as a process philosophy that can profoundly inform process views of organization and organizing. Our particular reading highlights Pragmatism's emphasis on process and emergence, its theory of knowing as fallible and experimental, its denouncing of dualisms, its future-oriented meliorism, its sensitivity to ethics and democracy, and its positioning of experience as both the start and end of inquiry, arguing that these features lay invaluable groundwork for the study of organization and organizing. We advocate a reappraisal of this legacy, mobilizing seven articles from the back catalogue of this journal in a virtual special issue that demonstrates how classical American Pragmatism can reinvigorate the field while also opening up new questions and new ways of questioning.

Globalization is often described as a chaotic process which signals the end of national institutions' ability to regulate markets. However, a closer look reveals a new world of standards and regulations, often with a transnational scope and reach. Contemporary rule making and rule monitoring increasingly take place in the context of transnational arenas that bring around the table many different types of actors, all of whom have or feel to have a "stake" in the regulatory project at hand, yet often for quite diverse reasons and with varying interests. While standardization would seem to suggest regularity, rationalization, and a reduction of diversity if not the advance of homogeneity and convergence, we can easily document a surprising multiplicity and plurality in our transnational world of standards. In most industries, fields and arenas, we find multiple standards and standard setting coalitions. Even so, scholars have only barely started to explore this multiplicity and plurality. Building upon what we know on technical standards, this Symposium describes and explains important patterns in the world of transnational standard-setting, revealing the nature of this plurality and the ways in which it impacts upon and is impacted by different groups of actors involved.

Within the global garment industry the term "urgent appeal" is used to describe a request for action to Western activist groups for support in a specific case of labor rights violations. The urgent appeal system has become an important strategy for the transnational antisweatshop movement. It is distinct from the movement's other strategies because it directly supports garment workers in their struggle for improved labor conditions while simultaneously informing and mobilizing Western consumers about substandard labor conditions in the garment industry. This article explores how reflexivity in the use of this particular strategy, strategic choice in its implementation, and interaction with allies and targets affect outcomes for garment workers. It confirms the relevance of the emerging strategic-interaction perspective in explaining movement outcomes.

Within the global garment industry the term 'urgent appeal' is used to describe a request for action to Western activist groups for support in a specific case of labor rights violations. The urgent appeal system has become an important strategy for the transnational antisweatshop movement. It is distinct from the movement's other strategies because it directly supports garment workers in their struggle for improved labor conditions while simultaneously informing and mobilizing Western consumers about substandard labor conditions in the garment industry. This article explores how reflexivity in the use of this particular strategy, strategic choice in its implementation, and interaction with allies and targets affect outcomes for garment workers. It confirms the relevance of the emerging strategic-interaction perspective in explaining movement outcomes. Adapted from the source document.

Amid concerns for a regulatory void in transnational fields, the principle of private regulation has become institutionalized. Many sectors have seen the emergence of multiple and overlapping standards. When comparing the sectors, there is considerable variation in standard multiplicity. We build on three institutional perspectives that have been put forward to explain the emergence of sustainability standards – the economic, idealist and political-institutional perspectives – to analyze the phenomenon of standard multiplicity. Each perspective reflects a different kind of action logic and is simultaneously present and accessible to various parties involved. Based on a cross-sector analysis of standards multiplicity in the forestry, coffee and textile sectors, this article seeks to make two contributions. First, whereas these three perspectives have been presented as competing, we propose that they are complementary in offering partial explanations for different episodes in the dynamics underlying standards multiplicity in different sectors. Second, whereas most studies have analyzed standard setting in single sectors and thus have understood it as being an intra-sector phenomenon, our cross-sector analysis of the dynamics of standard setting suggests that it is propelled by both sector-specific contingencies and experiences as well as by the experiences from other sectors.

This article critically interrogates the meaning of freedom and its current and potential relationship with social relations in and around work as introduction to this special issue. This interrogation is vital given neoliberalism's evaluative promise for more individual and corporate freedom, while concurrently limiting the conditions for the experience/expression of freedom of workers. Consequently, there are concerns about working for "private governments", workers being subject to electronic surveillance, and workers increasingly caught up in structural disadvantages (i.e. precarious work) that contribute to growing unfreedom. Rather than reproducing abstract principles around freedom, this article and special issue advance a contextually sensitive emergence of freedom. We explicate this emergence as (i) alternative experiences of freedom, (ii) alternative conceptions of freedom, and (iii) alternative modes of organizing. To inspire future research, we extend these themes to suggest that treating freedom (i) as pluralist/relational and (ii) as having the capacity for world-making has meaningful implications for how work is organized and for whose benefit. We advocate an explicit turn to non-neoliberal values (e.g. collectivism, solidarity, human dignity, respect, and recognition) to enable more relational versions of freedom that can serve as a basis for freedom as world-making at work and in society.

The objective of this study is to contribute conceptually and empirically to the discussion about when firms attempt to align their political efforts with their social goals and how this alignment affects their financial performance, an area currently still under-explored. The empirical context for our analysis focuses on companies that have been singled out due to their efforts to emphasize "shared value" defined as integrating competitive and social policies. The specific research questions that we shed light on in this study include: What have been the types of political efforts that these firms singled out in the pursuit of their shared value goals? Or, stated slightly differently: What is the political capacity of firms who have embraced social goals as part of their competitive strategy? Relatedly, we ask whether shared-value firms are more likely to deploy their political efforts to promote their social values initiatives and whether political and social alignment boost a firm's net income.

The relationships between social movements and civil society on the one hand, and the corporate world on the other hand, are often shaped by conflict over the domination of economic, cultural and social life. How this conflict plays out, in current as well as in historical times and places, is the central question that unites the papers in this special issue. In this essay, we review the differences and points of contact between the study of social movements, civil society and corporations, and offer an agenda for future research at this intersection that also frames the papers in the special issue. We suggest that three research areas are becoming increasingly important: the blurring of the three empirical domains and corresponding opportunities for theoretical integration, the institutional and cultural embeddedness of strategic interaction processes between agents, and the consequences of contestation and collaboration. The papers in this special issue are introduced in how they speak to these questions.

Organizations need legitimacy to be able to operate effectively. Consequently, and just like their participants, multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) need to respond when faced with legitimacy challenges from external parties. We build on current theory to identify three organizational elements that can be made the subject of legitimacy critique - i.e., statutory procedures, objectives and mechanisms - and use these elements to structure our analysis of a conflict-ridden case concerning the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC). Whereas prior work suggests that organizations can respond to such conflicts in a fashion consistent with either moral entrapment or decoupling, we show that organizations can also respond by deflating their statutory procedures and objectives. A deflationary response can help organizations maintain their validity by diminishing the ability of external parties to advance propriety-legitimacy critiques against them. By examining this alternative response, we expand the scope and refine the analytic detail by which organizational legitimacy conflicts can be investigated.